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Simple-Talk Roundup April 11

Published 11 April 2014 1:26 pm

Heartbleed is the big issue of the day, we hope that everyone has changed their passwords and updated their certificates. If you aren’t sure what to do or if you’ve been living under a rock, Troy Hunt’s written a pretty exhaustive blog post about it which you should check out. For a significantly shorter overview, see the XKCD version.

Apart from the obvious horribleness of what appears to be a massive security breach for, well, everyone, it sparks an interesting debate about using open source software. Should businesses and experienced developers enthusiastically encourage and contribute to open source projects to improve the code and standards for everyone, ensuring mistakes like this don’t happen again? Or, should vital software be proprietary so you know that there are standards that are linked not only to an individual coder’s reputation, but that of the whole business as well?

We hope that people see this as a red flag that encourages more investment (of the people variety) in OSS, instead of the opposite, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Author highlight: Celko

Joe Celko™, king of the articles that produce comments that rival the article in length, has been very busy lately so we’ve decided to highlight a couple of our personal favourite Celko articles.

Things Joe Celko hates:

Look-up Tables in SQL is a scathing critique of the One True Lookup Table mentality. Use an auxiliary table that holds static data instead.

BIT of a problem is a pun! Joe Celko has written an article on why the BIT data type doesn’t work very well in a SQL database. When he writes “I just want you to know I did not invent this schema as a straw man” I think we know what’s coming.

From around the web

SQL Server Central ran a survey for DBAs to submit stories from their worst day as a DBA. SSC pulled out their favourite 5 for the community to vote for the best. Voting is over and the winner’s been chosen, but the stories are still great reads. Laugh, cry, commiserate, and thank your lucky stars it didn’t happen to you!

Andrew Pruski has written, well, database design guidelines for developers. The title says it all really. These are quick lists of things you should check, not a how-to guide, looking at database design, table design, querying data, indexes, and references.

Stan Kulp took on the task of creating an SSIS conditional data flow task, manually adding a data flow task to the control flow container of an empty SSIS package, then walking through the wizard to add source, transformation and destination elements to the data flow container. Side-splittingly funny? Perhaps not. Great explanation of how to do this task? Yes. Yes it is.

GitHub user Jake Worth looks like he spent a remarkable amount of time around the web trawling for free technical books, and compiled his findings into one heck of a list. Simple-Talk is very happy to have our books featured quite heavily in the SQL Server section.